Kathleen Caprario traded the concrete canyons of the New York City metropolitan area where she grew up for the real canyons and broad skies of the Pacific NW in the late 1970's. Since moving to Oregon, she has established herself as a studio artist and art educator. Caprario exhibits her work regionally and nationally and is the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, the Modesto Lanzone Mostra 99 Award and several Ford Family Foundation Mid-Career Artist Residency Awards, as well as numerous juror and exhibition awards. Artist residences at the Ucross, Djerassi, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek, Morris Graves, Playa and Jentel Foundations and the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest have informed and continue to inspire her work. Her creative work internationally includes living and working with Aboriginal children in Central Australia as part of Victoria University’s SWIRL Program and most recently, an artist residency in Hakone, Japan through ARIS—Artist Residency In Sengokuhara. Caprario is a founding member of the Gray Space Project, a micro mobile venue and artist-driven cohort that focuses on issues of place. In addition to Caprario's studio practice, she writes and performs stand-up comedy and is an adjunct art foundations instructor at Lane Community College, Eugene, OR.
Her cut and stenciled mixed media paintings evolved from the question, "How am I shaped by my environment?" and seek to reconnect personal and cultural identity with the land—the intersection between physical place and cultural space. The repeated and abstracted forms she observed in nature are patterned to reference the trope of wallpaper; landscape is frequently considered in Western societies as merely the backdrop against which human activity occurs that alters and consumes its natural resources. In this way, it is similar to wallpaper, an important but often overlooked environmental influence. The drawn absences—the cut-outs—identify environmental boundaries with those areas questioning historic use, appropriation and ownership. What is present also represents an absence, given an alternative value system and use. This is the dichotomy of the American West and the sustainability of our culture and its context, the environment.
Her social practice, White Noise Project, is an ongoing action that engages numerous platforms from installations to video and artworks to examine white privilege and the institutional racism and violence against People of Color in America. The project offers Caprario more questions than answers as she attempts to compress and juxtapose time and history and to identify patterns that visually engage and inform her viewer. Intersecting with her environmental work, questions of whose land is it and whom do we see and not see in the land are raised. America has been, to a great degree, built on the bodies of people of color and Caprario asks herself how she, as a white woman, reconciles that past as she walks through the present and into the future of our racially charged social landscape?
